When I was at primary school, our teacher
proudly showed us the maps of Gerard Mercator,
a native from my county, and
told us this was how the world looked.
Only much later, in high school, did I
find out that Belgium was not just two
or three times smaller than our erstwhile
colony Congo, and that the maps of the
famous cartographer grossly exaggerate
the sizes of the countries away from the
equator, even leaving out altogether the
largest part of the southern hemisphere.
Maps, so it transpired, did not present
a truthful image of the state of matters
and the matter of states, but were more
or less a product of the dominating worldview.
With some effort, I laid hands on a Peeters
projection of the world, and I grew accustomed
to another ideologically laden but at
least more fair flattening
of the planet.

I could of course recall a similar anecdote
about my history lessons, where we got
fed an entirely skewed, Eurocentric narrative
in which China, India and the Americas
only acted as supporting characters. As
with the maps, history seemed to center
round the Mediterranean, gradually spreading
out when the proverbial white spots in
olden maps were filled in by fearless
conquistadores, settlers, discoverers
and missionaries. Even after many years
of reading, I could only write Hic
est Leones or something similar
on some parts of the map. One of these
blank areas, both historically and geographically,
was Russia and the vast Siberian expanse
east of the Urals. To be honest, about
the other countries east of the Iron Curtain
I couldnt bring up even the most
basic historic data. The Kingdom of Kiev,
which dominated Eastern Europe for much
of the Middle Ages and the Grand Duchy
of Lithuania, which spread from the Baltic
to the Black Sea and included part of
what is now Poland and Byeloruss, were
 and I think still are for most
people of my generation  entirely
unknown. Russia, as far as I was concerned,
had been christened by Cyrillus and Methodius
and then left over to the absolutist power
of the Tsars, as it had, in my mind, always
been.

I can think of no better, more entertaining
and more informative way to get rid of
all these misconceptions than by reading
this beautifully written analysis of early
Russian maps. For the first part of the
book, Valerie Kivelson browsed through
hundreds of small-scale maps drawn by
civil servants, mayors and military men
for use by magistrates from Moscou when
dealing with conflicts about mills, fields,
groves and ponds. Using these maps and
the accompanying documents, she gradually
gives us insight in how the people from
the Muscovy era (about a century before
the times of Peter the Great, who quickly
modernised Russia and Russian cartography
along Western lines) thought about their
environment, about their land and about
the complex rights of ownership. In the
process, she unravels the delicate power
structures of the Muscovy state, where
every piece of land was nominally owned
by the Great Prince, who graciously left
it to some landlord or abbey or township
to be managed. In their turn, village
farmers who were bound to the ground worked
these feuds. On each level, the people
involved kept a sense of ownership, establishing
a threefold structure of responsibility.
Serfs thus could act as witnesses in lawsuits
between lords, even if most of them were
probably illiterate.

In the second part of the book, Kivelson
interprets some beautiful maps of the
whole Muscovy realm, outlining the colonisation
process and the particularities of the
Russian conquista of Siberia. Unlike
Western maps, most of the Muscovy ones
include the names of the local peoples
and indicates the regions where they live.
And unlike the enslaving and dispossession
of original populations by Spanish, Portuguese,
French and British conquerors, the rights
of these peoples were preserved 
at least up to a certain level. As long
as they paid tribute to the Tsar, in the
form of sable hides, they were left to
their ways, their religions and customs.
And baptism was only reluctantly bestowed
on the heathens because that
would turn them in full citizens with
all the accompanying rights. Compared
to the Spanish and the Portuguese, Tsarist
imperialism seems downright enlightened
 at least in this respect.

Of course, there is much more to be learned
from studying the maps of the Seventeenth
Century. Students of Russian history will
find in this book a balanced and very
careful re-evaluation of some aspects
of the Muscovy worldview. How did people
think of Nature, the power structure they
were living in, and the right of colonised
and colonisers? As well, they will get
access to reproductions in full colour
of some of the most extraordinary maps
made in that period. For the lay reader,
with little or no background in either
cartography or Russian History, this is
simply a delightful treasure of novel
ideas and eye-openers. From now on, forget
about Mercator, and remember Semen Remezov!